How Emotional Abuse in Your Christian Marriage Impacts Your Spiritual Health - Emotional Abuse 101 | Part 5 [360]
Flying Free
Natalie Hoffman
5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emotional abuse in a Christian marriage doesn't just damage your mental health. It corrodes your spiritual foundation until you can't tell the difference between God's voice and your abuser's voice anymore.
🔑 Key Takeaways:
- Emotional abuse doesn’t just affect your mind and body. It wounds your soul.
Natalie draws a powerful connection between emotional abuse and spiritual damage, especially for Christian women who’ve been taught not to trust themselves. - When you’re conditioned to distrust your own inner knowing, spiritual confusion sets in. This leads to internal conflict, spiritual isolation, and the inability to differentiate between God's voice and the voice of your abuser.
- The church’s role often compounds the harm. Religious teachings that equate self-trust with rebellion against God cause many women to stay in abusive situations out of fear of divine punishment.
- You were never meant to worship at the altar of someone else’s control. God doesn’t ask you to sacrifice your voice, sanity, or safety. He offers freedom, not bondage.
📚 Natalie Reads from Her Memoir: All the Scary Little Gods
Timestamp 2:00–20:30
Natalie reads Chapter 58: “Bible Counseling”, which recounts two devastating encounters with so-called “biblical counselors.” These counselors weaponized scripture to enforce submission and silence rather than support.
Through deeply personal storytelling, she illustrates how spiritual guidance can become a vehicle for psychological and spiritual gaslighting.
🎁 I want to give you a free gift. It’s the audio version of my book, All the Scary Little Gods. It’s a spiritual memoir about healing from religious trauma and toxic programming. You can listen to it FREE by going to scarylittlegods.com
🎙️ Watch the rest of this Emotional Abuse 101 series (as it comes out) HERE.
🔗 Other Links and Resources Mentioned
- 🧭 Free Resources & Support — Visit flyingfreenow.com
- 📕 Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage — Order on Amazon https://amzn.to/4o5FCM8
- 💌 Join the Flying Free Kaleidoscope — Visit joinflyingfree.com
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Natalie Hoffman of Flying FreeNow.com, and you're listening to the Flying Free Podcast, |
| 0:10.4 | a support resource for women of faith looking for hope and healing from hidden emotional and spiritual abuse. |
| 0:19.9 | Welcome to episode 360 of the Flying Free podcast. This is also |
| 0:26.4 | part five of my series called Emotional Abuse 101, Everything You Need to Know. You can listen to |
| 0:32.6 | part one, which is about the 10 most subtle signs of emotional abuse in a Christian marriage, |
| 0:37.4 | and part two, the art of saying no, setting boundaries when you've been trained to say yes. |
| 0:42.5 | Part three, how to tell the difference between normal marriage problems and emotional abuse. |
| 0:47.8 | And part four, why women keep second guessing themselves in painful Christian marriages. |
| 0:53.0 | So we talk a lot about how abuse impacts your |
| 0:56.2 | mental health and how it causes anxiety and depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder, |
| 1:02.8 | but what we don't talk about enough is what happens to your actual faith. Not your church attendance, |
| 1:08.9 | not just whether you're reading your Bible. I'm talking about |
| 1:11.6 | what happens to your soul when the very faith that's supposed to bring you life starts bringing you |
| 1:17.5 | death instead. You know that internal GPS we all have? That inner sense that tells us when something's |
| 1:24.5 | wrong, when we're not safe, when we really just need to pay attention, |
| 1:28.0 | that is an important part of how God made us. |
| 1:30.5 | Just like our nerves are there to let us know if something is too hot or too cold or cutting |
| 1:34.9 | into our body so that we can react and get away, we also have this internal safety warning system. |
| 1:41.2 | We dismiss our own internal knowing when we've been taught that to trust ourselves |
| 1:46.0 | is not to trust God, and that is where the real spiritual damage begins. I'm going to tell you |
| 1:53.1 | about how this happened to me by giving you an inside peek into two traumatic experiences I had |
| 1:58.2 | with Bible counselors many years ago. And to do that, I'm going to actually |
... |
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